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I’ve been reading a lot of modern scientific research on happiness and most of it seems a little incomplete. Or rather it doesn’t get to the underlying principle of what it takes to truly make a human happy. So for example, you read something like relationships make us happy. But then when you correlate it to your own experience some relationships make us happy and others don’t. And even if they do, why is it? And you’ll read something like man is a social animal or is wired to be social. And that is true but doesn’t seem complete.
So the question is, is there one underlying principle for happiness? And if so what is it and how do you apply it in your life? And the answer is, yes, there is and to understand it you have to deconstruct what it means to be human. Right, so according to Eastern thought an individual is really a limited condition manifestation of the infinite consciousness. And that sounds like a bit of a mouthful. But the metaphor here is that you are really like a wave in the ocean. So you are made of the same underlying fabric and constitution as the ocean, but your experience is that of a limited individual wave.
And if you think of yourself as a limited individual wave rather than the ocean or the infinite consciousness, then you’ll always feel incomplete and you’ll always look for something outside yourself to complete you. So you know that’s the experience that we have in our daily life and we look to complete ourselves through a different relationship. Or a different friendship or something else outside us at work. And at that moment you feel incomplete and unhappy. If you think of yourself as the ocean, on the other hand, you feel that you have everything and you lack nothing at all. And that makes you completely happy. But that’s easier said than done. In an everyday life, you don’t get up in the morning thinking that you are the infinite. And nor if you are not in a completely spiritual environment where you’re spending hours meditating and reflecting on these concepts and theory and practice. You don’t really have that experience daily.
How do you build that idea into your daily life?
The simple answer to that is to spend as much of the day as you can on activities where you lose your sense of individual self completely. Where you’re so absorbed that you have no sense of self left at all.
What are those activities?
Let’s kind of classify them into three categories.
- Work
- Relationships
- Hobbies
- Right, so starting with work and we’ve talked about work a lot in other videos. But work that makes you lose your sense of self completely is work that is in line with your tendency. Which stretches you, pushes you, makes you grow. But not so much that it breaks you. So it’s somewhere in that like the perfect range of stretching and pushing you but not so much that it completely overwhelms and breaks you. And it’s in line with your tendency. So if you find work like that that will make you completely, transcendentally happy. And there are other videos that I’ve kind of gone into some detail on that that you can check out.
- The second one is relationships and again there are two kinds of relationships. One is relationships of true transcendental love. Like, think of it is your kids, your spouse, a couple of very close friends. Where you have such an overwhelming feeling and expression of love that you completely forget yourself. And you completely forget your sense of self and lose all self-consciousness completely. And these are very few relationships that that will happen. The more you can surround yourself in those relationships the happier you’ll be. Or there are relationships that you form with strangers and acquaintances and less close friends where you are so absorbed in a discussion or in an argument that you lose again all sense of presence at all. You’re completely or you become the discussion if you will. And the more you kind of do those kinds of discussions and interactions again the happier you’ll be.
- The third is hobbies. For me, those hobbies typically are what I think of as creation, spiritual or physical hobbies. In creation, hobbies would be writing or creating even a YouTube video. These are activities that in which I’m so absorbed that I don’t like to have a very conscious sense of self left at all. So I know those make me very happy. Or they are like those spiritual hobbies like meditation where I’m again, like concentrating and fully at the moment. And I’m suspended in that state of no-self. Or these are physical activities like tough hiking, etc, which I do a lot. In which I again become the hike if I will and lose myself. So the more you can construct your life around work, relationships, and hobbies, in which you have no sense of self left at all, the happier you’ll be it’s as simple as that. What also follows as a corollary is that you should eliminate all such activities that don’t fit into that criteria in your day. So work is the first one. In which work is not in line with your tendency or in which you’re not stretching and growing. Or which is overwhelming you. Try to get rid of it because it will not make you happy and sooner or later that will show in your performance. Second in terms of relationships.
Eliminate relationships of obligation. So if you’re spending too much time going for your second cousin’s wedding or some other activity or the fourth of July party with people that you barely know. Typically these will be occasions in which you’ll go, you’ll be self-conscious or will have a very strong sense of self. You’ll not have those engaging discussions in which you lose yourself. Or that feeling of overwhelming love for the people involved in that interaction. And as a result, you’ll end up spending time there but you’ll never feel a sense of happiness or feel a sense of social connectedness that equation is supposed to give you.
So I would eliminate relationships of obligation. And third, choose hobbies in which you are truly feeling that sense of dissolution. Like as I said creation hobbies, physical hobbies or spiritual hobbies. Versus the hobbies that most people end up with. For example, going for dinner, right? Unless you’re like this connoisseur of food who’s really absorbed in the taste and the sound and the smell of food, most likely it’s going to be a little bit of an empty interaction. Or drinking a couple of glasses of wine again you’ll feel that sense of self of suspension there. But it’s an artificially constructed sensation. Again choose those hobbies meaningfully and eliminate hobbies that don’t meet that criterion. So that in summary is how to be transcendentally happy all the time. Choose activities that make you lose your sense of self, that absorbs you completely and you’ll be happy. See you next week. Bye-bye.
This is Karan Bajaj and I want to offer you my free meditation video course today.
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